Startup Weekend Boulder

What is Startup Weekend?

Posted on Aug 07, 2007 @ 12:45 am in weekend

That is the most common question mailed to me by organizers. How do I explain it to others? Do you have a onesheet?

It is a simple concept with thousands of complexities. Here is what I tell people:

Startup Weekend is Jazz for Entrepreneurs.

It is what happens when you get brilliant people together, using their skills to build a company they want to work on. It is a crazy idea, that countless people can point out countless holes in (and countless people just don’t get), but for some reason, it just works.
I tried to get a friend of mine to move to Boulder, and it took this crazy idea to get him to come out. Jeff has some beautiful things to say about the weekend. He now has a new job, a new career and a great outlook on life.

The concept was born out of the great, and incredibly friendly and giving Boulder Tech community, which made me ask myself, “Can you dream?”

VoSnap Blog

Posted on Jul 26, 2007 @ 10:38 am in weekend

The weekend is long over, but VoSnap still lives.

http://vosnap.com/blog/

More Startup Weekends will be planned at StartupWeekend.com 

Brutal Honesty: A failure, and a success

Posted on Jul 09, 2007 @ 11:47 am in weekend

The silence since last night has been deafening, I agree. Here is some brutal honestly from an insiders point of view.

From what I could gather, the situation was that at about 3am this (Monday) morning the dev team turned in their best effort, and called it a weekend. By then, though, the sysadmins and people who knew how to deploy this thing had gone home. They all had day jobs today to get to. So they had no ability to push the project to the production servers. As of this morning, the group of 70 people have gone back to whatever it is they do all day long. Everyone is franticly trying to reach everyone else to see if we can’t at least push the 80% working version of vosnap to the production servers at Amazon EC2. We now find ourselves disbanded with most of the team leads sleeping off the weekend.

As the blogger for this event, writing almost 100 posts in one weekend, I can assure you that I am as disappointed and frustrated as anyone else that worked on this project.

Here’s an inside look at the weekend, and when we figured out that things were going wrong. Then I’ll sum up with the lessons learned and why I still think Startup Weekend was a success in one sense. Clearly it was not a success at the stated goal - to launch a startup in just one weekend. It failed.

On Friday night, the first major mistake was made. Things were just too harmonious and congenial. Leaders emerged from the type A personalities simply because they wanted to be leaders more than because they had the best experience or the most on the line. The Java platform was selected, and a design that was over-engineered for an early prototype was set in motion. People with much more experience sat on the sideline and simply watched this happen, going with the flow. I was one of them, so I know. One of the groups up front fears was that there would be too much conflict. In retrospect, there was not enough healthy conflict in the early hours.

Saturday, we had been told to expect an “ugly” prototype by around 1pm. It didn’t happen. Then we were told to expect a pretty prototype by about 6pm. That didn’t happen either. Those of us with lots of experience in watching software projects happen knew this was not a good sign and indicated likely failure. In fact, we still didn’t have a prototype by the end of Saturday! Nobody in the room had used it besides dev. A group of about 10 people starting talking in private about the fact that the product was being over engineered and not revved quickly enough. A proposal to set off a splinter group of Rails developers first surfaced then.

By Sunday morning, when still nobody had seen any sort of working prototype this mutiny hit full steam. A small mutiny was underway. By around 11am on Sunday, it was in full force and it was announced that a Rails team would set off in competition to pass the Java team. In the end, Andrew tactfully saved this by a) admitting his mistake, and b) getting the Rails team to work in concert with the Java team.

By Sunday evening, things seemed fine again. We were shown a reasonable working version by about 6pm. The energy level went way up in the room and we pumped out more buzz-crap in anticipation and with confidence.

It was then announced that it was midnight or bust. At midnight, we had to leave the temporary office we had gotten the use of for the weekend. The live camera went offline for good. A group of about 8 developers migrated elsewhere for web access and this was all that was left of the team. By 3 am this morning, they were ready to launch *something* but were crippled by the timing and the disbanding of the group. Nobody had the right passwords to the production servers, or whatever. It didn’t get done.

I woke up this morning at about 6am like a kid on Christmas, and ran to my computer to check out vosnap. Nothing but a splash page and a big WTF.

So that was problem #1 - The leaders who emerged did not clearly understand that this was a launch or bust proposition, and didn’t manage effectively towards it. But it’s not the fault of the leaders who emerged. It’s the fault of the leaders who didn’t - and I put myself in that category. I was more interested in the experiment than in making sure that it worked.

Problem #2 was that the expectations of the group at startup weekend didn’t really match the expectations that we set forth to the world. Having spent almost the whole weekend with these 70 folks, it was clear to me that this was a social experiment from the start. It was said often and early in the room that if we launch the site on Sunday night, that this would be a bonus. But this is not the image that was set forth to the world. This is nobody’s fault but ours, obviously.

So, yes, Startup Weekend failed. This is obvious. But at the same time, it succeeded in bonding the startup community here together even more tightly and giving 70 people a common goal. Five other major cities have written and want to run their own Startup Weekend. Failure is success, if you learn. I think we learned.

If there are more Startup Weekends in the future, we now know how to make them better. We understand the keys, which are:

1) To make the goals clear both inside and outside the room.
2) To make your most experienced and respected folks the team leaders. Development is hard. This is all that will matter.
3) To not be so laid back as a group about important decisions.
4) To make the Sunday midnight deadline very firm. Launch something at that time, no matter what.

So what happens next? There is a core group of about 20-30 people who plan to keep working on this. They’ll launch something in the coming days or weeks. And I’ll use it. Especially if we do another Startup Weekend.

The success here? This was a tremendous experience for everyone involved. You learn from failure and you get better. I met a ton of cool people. I’m disappointed and a bit mad. But I don’t feel like I wasted my weekend. Intellectually, I learned.

Is this is good way to do a startup? Probably not, at least in my opinion. I wondered that aloud on the first night. Most startups fail because of a failure of the team. This was certainly the case here. The odds were great that this would happen with 70 founders.

Andrew did an amazing job here. And Andrew knows more than anyone in the world now about how to build a startup in a weekend, and perhaps more importantly, how not to.

I look forward to seeing where he takes this next. Knowing him, these problems won’t slow him down one bit.

Walking Toward a Launch

Posted on Jul 09, 2007 @ 02:48 am in weekend

To those of you up late looking for our launch, thanks so much. It has been fun interacting with the online startupweekend.com community all weekend. Our appologies for not having something for you right now.

 

 

We will launch soon.  We will send out an email to everyone that signed up through vosnap.com when we do launch.

Four cities have shown interest in hosting a startup weekend of their own, and I couldn’t be more excited. Please get in touch with me, I and quite a few original startup weekenders would love to come out and see your neck of the woods. Email me at info@startupweekend.com.

 

Til launch…

Vosnap. It’s decided.

Posted on Jul 09, 2007 @ 12:10 am in video, weekend

Launch coming overnight….

Almost there…

Posted on Jul 09, 2007 @ 12:06 am in weekend

Vosnap is almost ready to roll out to production. Thanks for hanging in there. Most of you have gone off to dreamland by now. But we are still hard at work. Keep checking vosnap.com. More soon.

Gambit visits for the launch

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 11:29 pm in video, weekend

Gambit the Hedgehog just stopped by in anticipation of the launch.

Gambit visits for the launch from David Cohen and Vimeo.

Animated banners

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 10:50 pm in weekend

You asked for animated banners. We delivered. It’s almost magic.

Banner ads for you

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 09:58 pm in weekend

Please stick a banner ad on your site and link it to vosnap.com. Thanks, we’d appreciate it.

Link to us. We deserve it.

Midnight or bust….

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 09:14 pm in weekend

It was just announced that we’ll put vosnap out there at midnight. Of course, it won’t be perfect, but we think it will do what it’s supposed to do. Then we’re all going home to sleep. 3 hours to go!

« Previous Entries